


Scheduling Error

by Wilde_Shade



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Apocalypse, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-21 06:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wilde_Shade/pseuds/Wilde_Shade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world ended on a Wednesday. Carlos had completely forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scheduling Error

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Ошибка в расписании](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1370932) by [Shimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shimon/pseuds/Shimon)



> I try not to write many fics outside of Yuletide. I really do. But I happened upon WtNV and couldn't seem to get it off my brain. It's interfering with my writing, so here I am. Here's hoping it's out of my system now and I can get back to work. It worked with Bioshock Infinite. There's no reason it shouldn't work now.
> 
> I had entirely too much fun writing this. That said, it ended up a hell of a lot longer than I meant for it to. It probably could have used a beta and a good editing down, but... Ugh. Apologies for my terrible punctuation and any inaccuracies with the canon. I've only listened through once and it's still early days for that wiki.

“I don’t really feel like going out tonight, Cecil.”

“Oh… That’s all right. That’s fine. Maybe some other time.”

“I still want to see you! I just thought, maybe… I don’t know… Maybe we could stay in?”

 “Oh… _Oh_ … Uh-huh. Yes, I can cook dinner. You could come over here, and-”

“No! ...I mean, why don’t- Why don’t you come here?”

“Okaaay... That works, too. I’ll, ah, see you tonight?”

“Sounds good!”  Carlos put down his cellphone so fast, he wasn’t sure it caught his last syllable. There was a very real chance he had yelled “Sounds!” at Cecil before hanging up. He sat there, silent for a moment, letting the embarrassment register. It came on slowly and then all at once, creeping in cold before turning his face hot. “That was weird,” he said into the soft electrical hum of his lab.

He looked down at the papers on his desk, at his notes and his charts, and he couldn’t focus for a moment – even though he _really_ needed to. The town’s water supply had gained sentience yesterday. It wasn’t violent, thank goodness, but it did have the intelligence of a young, unintelligent, child and a limited vocabulary that was making thirsty denizens of Night Vale feel rather guilty.

_Don’t be so hard on yourself_ , thought Carlos. All things considered, he was allowed to be a little _weird_ from time to time. (Assuming such a word still held meaning.) Being a scientist in Night Vale was usually such a thankless job. Interesting? Intensely. Gradually consuming his sanity? Probably. Mostly just thankless, though. Less than thankless some days. Sometimes he woke up in the desert wastes, a bag still over his head and a fading memory, both monumentally important and insidiously sinister, slipping from his mind.

Maybe that was why he liked Cecil so much. He could sit and do nothing, and Cecil would probably still think he was perfect. Carlos thought that was nice. It was good to have someone in your life who was both unconditionally impressed by you and observationally fascinating. All scientists should be so lucky.

_It’s fine_ , Carlos told himself, and this time his own reassurances relieved him. Even if Cecil did think he’d sounded odd just now, he was unlikely to judge him for it.

But then Carlos wondered why it was that he had panicked at all, why he had been so adamant about not going to Cecil’s apartment. He knew he had a reason. He’d remembered it just a moment ago… Hadn’t he? He needed to work on this water thing and needed to do so from his lab. Was that it? No… No, not entirely.

Oh, well. It was probably fine.

But then Carlos wondered something else entirely. He wondered if Cecil would infer something specific from ‘Maybe we could stay in?’ Something more intimate. _No_ , thought Carlos. _Surely not._

 

 

* * *

 

 

Carlos was wrong.

There was no denying that Carlos’ interpersonal skills were not the best. Over the past year, he hadn’t had much time for romance, friendships, book clubs or ritualistic chanting or recreational time travel or however it was people engaged with one another socially in Night Vale. Time was less of an immediate concern as of late, both literally and figuratively. (But mostly literally.) It was still in his nature to miss certain social cues, which was why he didn’t realize he had been wrong until he overheard Cecil telling the solicitous tap water in the kitchen that, “Honestly, I thought we were going to have sex.”

Aside from that, Carlos didn’t really see any other indication that the night was going badly. They watched a movie. Carlos didn’t own a television, but he did have a laptop that, for the past month, had only played Ferris Bueller's Day Off on an endless loop. He might have tried taking the laptop apart, but it was an old laptop and Carlos rather liked Ferris Bueller's Day Off - even if the part of Cameron, in this version, was played by a tall and spindly shadow creature that never said a line and only ever smiled.

Carlos asked if Cecil didn’t mind if he multitasked and Cecil said he wouldn’t dream of standing in the way of science, so multitask is what Carlos did. He looked at his notes and his charts and fed his functional laptop data. Except, maybe it was just a singular sort of tasking. By the time he had finished, the movie was midway through a subsequent loop and Cecil was gently snoring.

It was a wonder he hadn’t noticed, really. Cecil was stretched out across his lap in such a way that Carlos would have had to of put the laptop on Cecil’s back to keep working - which he, apparently, had done. And, judging by the accumulation of drool on his jeans, that had been some time ago.

Carlos closed his laptop and leaned back on the cramped loveseat. He set the laptop aside, trying not to wake Cecil. The voice of Night Vale appeared to be dreaming; at least Carlos hoped that was what the low-frequency humming and opalescent aura meant.  He wasn’t sure. He sat very still just in case.

Carlos closed his eyes for a moment, just to rest them. He thought back to the last time he’d had sex. It had been a while… Hadn’t it? Years, surely. A labmate named Laura. She had auburn hair and- No. No, that wasn’t right. There was something he was forgetting again. The something from before. Something about him and Cecil. Not one of the shady scientific somethings he forgot bi-monthly. A something relevant to now, to this night.

Carlos couldn't quite seem to grasp the memory. The more he reached for it, the faster it faded. This might have frustrated him at any other moment. But he was drowsy, which was lucky. The memory he was after stood right on the line between asleep and awake, and that was the line Carlos’ consciousness was staddling now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Carlos remembered a planet of awesome size.

It was an invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans.

It was literally, like, right above the Arby’s, and no one even seemed bothered by it.

The citizens of Night Vale were still shuffling along and driving past, eyes straight ahead or pointedly closed. Carlos, meanwhile, was drinking. He’d tried calling attention to their impending doom, but no one seemed to care.

The colleagues who had travelled to Night Vale with him cared, but, understandably, they were too full of existential dread to do science today.

It was getting closer now. Carlos had been in Night Vale for little more than a month, and the world was ending.

“Hello, Carlos,” a cheerful, familiar voice said.

“What?” said Carlos. “Oh… Hello, Cecil.” When Cecil said nothing, but continued to stand there and stare at him, Carlos added, “What is it?”

“You called me.”

“Did I?”

“You wanted me to tell the town about… I don’t know, something or another.”

“The _planet_ ,” Carlos reminded him. “Did you?”

“There’s no radio today,” said Cecil, laughter in his voice, like Carlos was silly for having forgotten. “It’s not _Wednesday_.”

Carlos took a pull of especially terrible whiskey, cringed, and removed his cellphone from his pocket to check the date. “Yes it is.”

“Right, but Wednesday isn’t this week.”

“Isn’t what?”

“It just _isn’t_. They canceled it.”

Carlos didn’t have words - or, maybe, they just all wanted to come out at once and wouldn’t fit. Somewhere in his stammering, Cecil climbed up onto the trunk of his car beside him.

“It’s fine,” said Cecil, giving him a hesitant pat on the shoulder. “It’ll be Thursday before we know it.”

“How?!” Carlos demanded, gesturing wildly at the sky. “Have you even looked up?!”

“No!” Cecil’s eyes went wide at the mere suggestion. He lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “Don’t look up. You’re not _supposed_ to look up.”

Carlos took Cecil by the chin (Which made him smile.) and tilted his head back to look at the sunless midday sky. (Which rather alarmed him.)

“Oh,” said Cecil, abject terror fading. “Oh,” he repeated, softly; he turned away and took a few furtive glances all around them before looking back up at the sky again.  “That’s lovely.”

_Lovely._ Carlos rolled his eyes. Of course it was. How silly of him to expect any other reaction. He sighed and leaned back against his rear windshield and offered Cecil his bottle of whiskey. He wasn’t sure why Cecil had come all the way out here, but Carlos didn’t want to be alone for the end of the world. “So looking at the sky is illegal, huh?”

“On days that aren’t officially sanctioned as existing, yes.” Cecil was giving the bottle of whiskey a thoughtful look, apparently unsure of how many laws he felt like breaking today.  “ _Well_ , actually, I think it’s illegal all the time. They don’t enforce it, though. It’s just frowned upon.”

“Uh-huh.”

Cecil took a drink. He made a face and handed the bottle back to Carlos. “Nothing you do today matters, though. I mean, today isn’t happening, so… if you were going to pick a day to commit crimes… Not that I would endorse that sort of thing. …Even though, I guess I’m actively breaking the law right now… And would have no way of knowing if I’ve broken the law on these sorts of occasions in the past since, again, they don’t exist – Am I talking too much?”

Carlos shook his head. “I like the sound of your voice. It’s soothing,” he said, which was the wrong thing to say. Cecil gave a sort of short, hysterical giggle before his vocabulary shrank suddenly to one word sentences and a small collection of noncommittal gestures.

They passed the bottle back and forth for a while, watched the sky, the planet of awesome size. Over time, Cecil’s vocabulary expanded; not that either of them were saying anything particularly intelligible or intelligent by then. Alcohol and dread had made Carlos’ mind dull. At some point, he was aware that Cecil was toying with his hair. At some point Carlos had taken his hand. At some point they had kissed. At some point, they had made out against the door to Cecil’s apartment while Cecil fumbled with his key.

Admittedly, there was a big jump between those last two. Carlos was pretty sure a car ride had happened somewhere in-between. It had probably been _really_ unsafe.

Things were still sort of a blur after that. Carlos remembered them stumbling into the apartment, remembered making it into the bedroom.

“Where’s…”

“In there. I’ll be right back.”

“Cecil… Do you have a dog?”

“I can’t hear you!”

“Do you have a dog?!”

“I don’t think so! Not anymore!”

“I thought I saw-”

“I’m back! Sorry… I mean, I’m back.”

Carlos remembered having sex. Maybe.

What he remembered, in more specific terms, was holding Cecil through static darkness; smoky tendrils like myriad limbs, with fingers that lightly brushed his skin; an ecstatic pressure, full of teeth, gently probing; and voices. Many voices. Screaming voices. But maybe that was coming from outside.

Carlos remembered climaxing. He remembered becoming aware of the beads of sweat on his body as the room cooled. He remembered drifting off to sleep in a tangle of limbs on bed sheets… so many limbs.

And then he remembered waking to the aftermath of something biting off his first and second fingers. Carlos screamed. To his left Cecil sat up and, probably, asked what was wrong; Carlos really couldn’t hear him over his continued screaming.

By the time the initial shock wore off, Cecil had his hand wrapped in a pillowcase and was leading him into the bathroom. Carlos realized he should go to the hospital; he then recalled that the world was ending and it didn’t matter, and also that he never wanted to visit Night Vale’s hospital, _ever._ Instead he said, “What.” It wasn’t a question, but Cecil answered it anyway.

“It’s this apartment building,” said Cecil, flipping on the light in the bathroom. “It has a… well-I-don’t-know-what-they-really-are problem. They eat though all sorts of things; wires, books, whatever part of you isn’t on your mattress at night. I told you to try and sleep toward the center of the bed. I guess you didn’t hear me. _God_ , Carlos. I feel awful about this.”

Carlos thought he probably felt worse.

“Geez, and you definitely have pain receptors, don’t you?”

“You don’t?!”

“Only on Wednesdays and Thursdays.”

“Oh…”

“There’s some good news, though! It didn’t get _a lot_ of your fingers. It just took a _tiny,_ nearly unnoticeable bite that… won’t be reattached, because it was undoubtedly eaten. So, a little bad news there… But! But that doesn’t matter because it never happened. It’s Wednesday! Your perfect hands will almost certainly be restored by Thursday!”

Carlos shook his head. “This is… This is ridiculous.”

“I know.  I mentioned it to the super weeks ago, but-”

“Stop.”

“Sorry?”

Carlos pulled his hand away from Cecil. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, he doubled over miserably. “This is impossible. All of this. This town, it’s impossible. I… I hate it.”

“Hate what?” Cecil’s voice had gone thin, like he was hoping he’d just misunderstood, like Carlos had said something unforgivably cruel.

“Night Vale!” Carlos snapped. He wished he hadn’t, but it was all so overwhelming. “Just… just leave me alone.”

“Carlos…”

“Please, just leave me alone.”

“Let me help.”

“No.”

“I can help.”

“No!”

“I could get you something for the pain.”

“No... Wait. Yes. Do that.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Carlos.”

Someone was nudging his shoulder.

“Carlos.”

Carlos blinked fully awake. Cecil was sitting next to him, wearing a concerned frown.  The smiling shadow face of Cameron Frye stared out at them both from the laptop on the coffee table. Carlos looked down at his fingers, making sure he had ten intact ones. He did.

“I think you were having a nightmare,” said Cecil.

Had it been a nightmare? Carlos wasn’t sure he had even been asleep. “I was remembering something.”

“Something interesting?”

“I guess…” Carlos frowned, trying to remember what had happened next. He was still deep in thought when Cecil stood up.

“I should probably head home,” said Cecil. “I had a good time. Don't worry about the end-of-date report. I'll take care of it.”

“Already?” It was jarring. Cecil never _volunteered_ to leave. The night really had gone badly. It had gone badly and Carlos was going to hear about it on the radio.

 “You seem busy, typing and thinking and doing science things.”

“I thought you liked science.”

“I love science. It’s just… I’ve _watched_ a lot of science these past few weeks. I know scientists are supposed to be self-reliant, but unless I can actually help, I-”

“You do help.”

“I do?” Cecil sounded intrigued. “How?”

Carlos couldn’t find the words to explain it. “Morale?”

“Oh,” Cecil said flatly. He stood there watching Carlos, quiet for a moment.  His expression gradually softened. “If you want me to stay, I’ll stay… obviously.”

Carlos _did_ want Cecil to stay. Realizing that sort of surprised him. The urge didn’t exactly mesh well with his recent memory and/or nightmare. “Do you want to spend the night?”

“I don’t think I can watch science that long, Carlos.”

“I was thinking maybe we could have sex.”

Cecil stood very still, assuming a calculated look of pleasant surprise. “Oh?” he managed.

“I thought maybe you wanted to tonight and were disappointed that we hadn’t.”

The calculated look of pleasant surprise was replaced by one of forced disdain. “I wouldn’t just assume…”

“I overheard you in the kitchen… I also see that you packed a Ziploc bag with a toothbrush and condoms in it. It’s on the sofa. I think it fell out of your pocket when you were asleep.”

Cecil looked like he wanted to leave again, like standing in front of Carlos was the last place he wanted to be right now. “I may have assumed. I apologize.”

“Come on,” said Carlos, standing. He headed for the bedroom.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to rush things.”

Carlos wasn’t sure. Carlos was terrified. “Come on,” he repeated.

Carlos and Cecil had sex for the temporally first, but _technically_ second, time. It was… fine. Vanilla and normal and _delightfully_ average. Carlos just laid there for a while after, on top of the sheets. They both did. There was a comfortable silence in the room. It was the kind of quiet you didn’t want to immediately disturb, a little window of time where you could just be content and breathe and think about nothing in particular.

Of course, when Carlos closed his eyes, there was something in particular that came to mind.

 

 

* * *

 

 

After bringing him something for the pain, Cecil had respected Carlos’ need for privacy. Sort of. Carlos could hear him sighing every so often and felt sure that he was standing just outside the door.

Carlos wasn’t sure how long it had been. He couldn’t really feel the effects of the alcohol anymore, or his injured fingers for that matter. He’d tied a towel around his hand with some dental floss and one of his shoe laces. He felt a little woozy, but mostly just sort of detached from both his injury and the situation. At one point, a spider had crawled out of the shower drain and hit him in the elbow with what he suspected was a bullet from some sort of tiny, rudimentary gun. He hadn’t cared and went right on not caring until the whole apartment began to shake.

Carlos stood, stepping up onto the side of the tub to look out of the bathroom’s small rectangular window. “God,” he breathed when he saw it.

“Where are you going?” Cecil asked, as Carlos rushed out of the bathroom and past him.

Carlos said nothing, desperately trying to determine where his clothes had ended up. He located his lab coat first and decided that was enough for his purposes. Throwing it on over his boxer shorts, he hurried from the apartment.

“Carlos!” Cecil called after him, but he was already taking the stairs at a run; up and up and up. There was a door that said ‘No Entry’ at the top and even more stairs inside. Carlos climbed them too. He climbed until he was on the roof. He walked out to the center of it, he looked up, and he stopped.

The planet of awesome size loomed above, closer than ever, so close Carlos was afraid to stand too tall, afraid he would touch it. The oceans were roiling, evaporating. The thick black forests were shedding leaves and growing brittle. The jagged mountains were chipping away and flaking into the atmosphere as the titan continued its descent.

The entire apartment building shook again. The approaching planet was cracking. From its core, something monstrous was hatching; Carlos could see it, distantly through a widening fissure, a great shifting of moist flesh on flesh.

Carlos’ legs shook, weak under the magnitude of it all. Before they could give out, he sank to the ground. He stared up.

The door to the roof opened, but it sounded so far away Carlos didn’t notice until Cecil was standing beside him.

“This is,” Cecil began, breathless either from the view or the climb up to it. “This is really something.” He walked past then, right up to the edge. There was less than foot of concrete between the roof and the sky. It made Carlos sick to his stomach just watching him.

“Cecil,” said Carlos. He couldn’t quite seem to find his voice. It just came out hoarse. “Cecil!”

If Cecil heard him, he was ignoring him. In his mind, Carlos was seeing the apartment shake again, with Cecil going right over the edge. Not daring to stand, Carlos closed the distance between them at a terrified crawl.

Cecil gave a start when Carlos grabbed his arm. Realizing who it was, he smiled. “Look down there,” he said.

Carlos didn’t want to. He really didn’t want to. Scientific curiosity got the better of him, though. Still gripping Cecil’s arm, he moved forward without standing. Bracing his injured hand on the low concrete barrier, he leaned his head out over the edge.

There were holes in Night Vale. There were dozens of them, swelling out like ink blots in the streets. They were under buildings, cars, homes. Carlos might have thought they were sink holes if everything had been sinking into them, but a lot of it seemed to be floating. He could see people hanging in the air like alien abductees.

Carlos looked into the nearest hole. He couldn’t see the bottom. Somehow he knew there wasn’t one. He _knew_ there was an unfathomable emptiness inside that was cold and black and sentient.

“Woah there,” said Cecil, grabbing Carlos before he could teeter completely off the edge.

Before he realized what was happening, Carlos was being pulled to his feet. He felt dizzy, boneless, staggering back against Cecil when he looked up again. There was no good direction to look in right now. They were all bad. Carlos realized he hadn’t felt hopeless before, hadn’t even really known what hopelessness was.

The building shuddered. The roof itself seemed to sag beneath his feet.

Carlos felt a pull; at first it was an incessant all-over tug that lifted the hem of his lab coat and the hair on his head. It wasn’t long before he felt it inside, in his stomach, like going down a steep hill in a car. Cecil’s arms were still around him from behind, but Carlos didn’t need his support to stand anymore. He didn’t even seem to need his own legs. _Or_ the apartment building beneath them. It was collapsing and they were still right where they were. Floating. Drifting upwards slowly, almost imperceptibly. It was like being caught between two warring sources of gravity.

It was impossible.

It insisted on happening anyway. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“-se your shower?”

Carlos opened his eyes. He was on his own bed, looking up at the ceiling. “What?”

“I asked if I could use your shower,” said Cecil. “Do you mind? You weren’t asleep, were you?”

“No… To both… Hang on, I’ll come with you.”

They had to move the books out of the tub first. The spiders weren’t so bad. They were actually really eager to learn. Cecil politely reminded Carlos that the books weren’t on the municipally approved reading list for spiders and that teaching them string theory wasn’t just unfunny, it was dangerous. Carlos thought he would probably keep doing it anyway, though.

The shower was nice, but inquisitive. Carlos wore clothes and tried to keep it as short as possible. Cecil didn’t. He thought it was silly to worry about a little sentient water when the Sherriff’s Secret Police were always watching.

The idea that they would put cameras in the showers struck Carlos as a little paranoid, even for Night Vale. He said as much.

Cecil just cupped his cheek and cooed, “It is _adorable_ that you think that.”

They went back to bed and just talked afterwards. It was small talk about entirely normal, completely mundane things. There was a somewhat alarming moment when Carlos realized Cecil didn’t actually seem to know what a cat looked like; Carlos wasn’t sure what lived in the men’s room of the radio station, but it sounded _terrible_. Other than that, though? Normal. So normal it was verging on concerning, actually. So far, his apparent repressed memories had been the weirdest thing about this night. Carlos brought it up, relaying his recent dreams to Cecil.

Cecil listened, only interrupting with some apologetic fretting over the whole finger thing. “And then?” he prompted when Carlos had finished.

“It hasn’t come to me yet,” said Carlos. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m mad _I_ don’t remember it. I thought tonight was our first time. And I'm sort of annoyed with Past Me, to be honest. I can’t fault myself, of course. I mean… look at you.” Cecil sighed. “Oh, well.”

“So you think it actually happened?”

“It certainly sounds like it did.”

“But what about…” Carlos struggled with the phrasing. “When I slept with you then, it was… It wasn’t like tonight.”

Cecil folded his hands in his lap and looked away. “Oh,” he said.

“Oh?” repeated Carlos.

“We should probably talk about that.”

“…Oh.”

Cecil took a deep breath. “Well, you see, on Wednesdays and Thursdays- ”

But Carlos didn’t find out what happened on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Everything, very suddenly, went black.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Below, Carlos could see City Hall, the radio station, The Dog Park. There were only landmarks left; the rest of Night Vale had floated upward or sunk beneath.

Above, Carlos could see the planet of awesome size. The crack bisecting it had widened and inside something was making low and dreadful keening sounds that rippled the air and made all that was inside you vibrate. It was awful. Without Cecil between him and it, the whole thing felt unbearably close, like they were there already. They weren’t, but they were still drifting upward. They would be there soon.

“Aren’t you scared?” Carlos asked during a pause in the keening.

“Wednesday is canceled,” Cecil assured him.

A frustrated scream caught in Carlos’ throat. He took a deep breath. “Imagine today _isn’t_ Wednesday, then. Imagine it’s a different day.”

“Like what? Like Thursday?”

“Sure.”

 Cecil was silent for a moment. “Is this hypothetical Thursday also canceled?” he asked.

“No. Thursday has consequences.”

“I would be terrified,” said Cecil, but then he seemed to reconsider. “Though, we can’t really do much about what’s happening now, can we? Fearing the futile is just time ill spent. This isn’t so different from life as a whole, really. We drift along, metaphorical specks of dust on the literal wind…”

Carlos rolled his eyes and tried to turn around as Cecil continued waxing philosophical. It was difficult to get leverage while floating. He managed to turn himself in a new direction, but there wasn’t much to look at. The closest person was about a dozen yards away and trying to move yet further away by pushing off of floating debris. A whole crowd of people seemed to be slowly converging on a lopsided podium, where Carlos thought he could just make out Mayor Pamela Winchell delivering a speech.

Movement from above caught his eye next. Something was coming out of the crack in the planet. _More_ people, Carlos realized. He counted dozens of them drifting down while everyone else drifted up.

“-when really, what we’re afraid of is change.” Cecil concluded. He paused. “I would still be terrified,” he amended.

“You wouldn’t just enjoy the ride?” Carlos hadn’t really been listening, but gathered that to be the gist of Cecil’s rambling.

“Well, the ride isn’t very long and there’s an _actual_ monster at the end of it. I’d just be, like, catatonic with fear.”

The proverbial “ride” was still longer than Carlos had anticipated. It had been at least half an hour and, though still afraid, he was actually getting… sort of anxious for it to just be over.

“It’s going to be fine,” Cecil told him, for the umpteenth time that day. To someone else he added a cheerful, “Hello!”

Several someones had drawn near while Carlos wasn’t looking. All but one of them had wings: an old, slightly hunched woman, whose name he remembered as starting with a “J”. Josie. That was it.

“The angels and I are going to what’s left of the Pinkberry,” said Josie. “Would you like anything?”

 “No, thank you,” said Cecil.

Josie gave Carlos an appraising look. She narrowed her eyes and pointedly looked away.

Carlos was reminded that he was only wearing his lab coat and a pair of boxer shorts. He pulled his coat closed.

“Would _you_ like anything?” asked Josie. It was just a polite question. He was meant to say ‘no’.

“No,” said Carlos. “…ma’am.”

Josie and the angels continued on their way. Josie and the _angels_. He’d seen them but never actually _thought_ the word ‘angels’ before. Once he’d had skepticism and a fundamental understanding of reality. Now he thought about angels. Not even in a spiritual sense. He wondered if he should have asked them for something from the Pinkberry. He hadn’t eaten anything since a late breakfast and he already felt lightheaded from… drinking… dismemberment… terror so profound fear lost all meaning, like a word repeated ad nauseum.

“I should have never come to Night Vale,” Carlos said quietly and to himself, but out loud nonetheless.

“Carlos!” Cecil seemed scandalized by the very idea. “You don’t mean that?”

Cecil.

Cecil was part of the problem.

Cecil talked about angels on the radio news. Cecil thought the end of the world was harmless. Cecil accepted the impossible as commonplace but resolutely denied much of the mundane. Cecil probably wasn’t human. Cecil had taken the time to throw on track pants and a Dark Owl Records hoodie before following Carlos out onto the apartment roof.

That last one didn’t actually matter much in the grand scheme of things. Carlos just resented him for it.

“Yes, Cecil,” Carlos sighed. “I mean it.”

Cecil stared at him, horrified. “Even before today?”

“Even before today.”

“What about the science?”

“I don’t think this town likes science.” And that was fair, Carlos didn’t like the town. “It doesn’t want me here.”

“I want you here! I love… science.”

“You look familiar!” said someone: it was not Carlos, not Josie, not Cecil – though, it did sort of look like him. The man was floating past, downward.

It was uncanny. He and Cecil did look a lot alike... except maybe the eyes? No. The smile? Probably. It was hard to tell beneath the… Was that animal viscera? It was red and black and crusted brown, congealing in the breeze.

Carlos didn’t have long to puzzle it out. Without any obvious provocation and little regard to the laws of physics, Cecil launched himself at his lookalike. Carlos grabbed on to the back of Cecil’s hoodie.

“Stop it!” Carlos had no experience breaking up midair brawls… If they were even fighting. It was hard to tell. “What are you- Don’t- Stop strangling him!” Carlos shouted, both because he didn’t condone violence and because Cecil’s lookalike seemed to be enjoying it.

Cecil let go and together he and Carlos flipped backward. It took them both a moment to catch their breath.

“Sorry,” said Cecil.

“It’s fine,” said Carlos, not because he actually thought anything about tonight was fine; he was still just trying to defuse the situation.

“I don’t know what came over me.”

Cecil began to glance back at his double, but Carlos caught his face in his hands. (Or, rather, one hand and a towel.) Cecil went motionless at this, his eyes going distant. “Don’t look at him then,” suggested Carlos. The lookalike was floating in the opposite direction and would be past them soon anyway. “Do you know who he is?”

“Who?” Cecil asked slowly, his voice as faraway as the look he was giving Carlos.

It occurred to Carlos then that Cecil might be into him. _Really_ into him. Romantically. These things did not occur to Carlos often. They seldom had cause to.

Carlos let go of Cecil’s face. With all this talk about how much he hated Night Vale – “I like you, Cecil,” he said, in case it needed saying. “If the world wasn’t ending and I had any desire to spend another day in this town, I might have liked to see how things went after a date or two instead of just… _Did we have sex earlier?”_

“You two would make an adorable couple,’ said Cecil’s double. Apparently, his and Cecil’s brawl had altered his trajectory somewhat.

“Go. Away,” seethed Cecil. When it became clear that the double could not, Cecil stretched away from Carlos, grabbed hold of a downward drifting lamp post, and gave his lookalike a firm shove. This was a mistake. Cecil doubled over the bloodstain blooming across the Dark Owl Records logo. “He stabbed me!”

“Soorrrry… !” called the double, moving down toward the black abyss again. The shove had given him quite the boost in speed. “Iiit waaas an accideeent… !”

Carlos pulled Cecil back toward him. “What do I do?! Should I do something?!”

“Iiiit waaas niiice meeeting yooou… !”

“I don’t know!”

“Should I put pressure on it?!”

“I don’t know! This _really_ hurts!”

“I thought you didn’t have nerve endings!”

“It’s Wednesday!”

“But Wednesday was canceled!” Oh, God. _He_ was doing it now. Carlos tried to put pressure on the wound, but that proved difficult. He only had one useable hand at the moment and attempting to incorporate his knees wasn’t much help. After a few false starts resulting in just shoving Cecil a couple of feet away, he gave up. “Cecil… I can’t… Can you do it?”

Cecil cut Carlos a look.

Carlos did the best he could, which didn’t actually seem to be helping. It was a distinct possibility that he was actually making things worse.

“Just-just… stop, please. Carlos _stop_ ,” said Cecil, having apparently had his fill of inept fumbling. “It’s fine… It doesn’t matter.”

Carlos started to argue but didn’t. Cecil had a point. Regardless of who was right about Wednesday, it would all be over soon. It wasn’t so far now. The crack in the planet had grown to a gaping, jagged chasm. A great, orange eye blinked at them all from within. The pupil dilated, shrank, dilated again. The keening returned and a gust of warm air came with it, carrying the scent of fish and rotten meat.

Carlos took a deep breath and felt it stutter when he exhaled. “I know this is going to sound selfish, but do you think you could just wait five, ten minutes to die?”

Cecil didn’t answer him.

Carlos took another deep breath and choked on it. He couldn’t bring himself to let go of Cecil, and he couldn’t bring himself to look down. Carlos looked up. An existential terror gripped him, clamping down around his heart as the awful cold expanded in his chest, until he couldn’t feel anything else, until his teeth chattered.

He was there. If he reached out, he could touch it now. The moment stretched like a photo finish and nothing felt numb. It was a monumentally bizarre death, made worse by the fact that he understood absolutely none of it. Somewhere, beneath the cold, it made Carlos furious, frustrated.

At least Cecil _thought_ he had answers. Carlos wanted to hear those now. He wanted to rationalize, dismiss, argue them. He wanted someone’s hand in his when he faced this kind of unknown because, mostly, what Carlos didn’t want was to be alone. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Carlos sat up in bed. The room was empty. “Cecil?”

“In the kitchen! Hang on!” called Cecil.

Outside, Carlos could see it was still dark outside. He was in his room, in Night Vale. Nothing had changed. Breathing a little easier, Carlos dropped back against his pillows. Cecil rounded the corner a moment later, a steaming mug in one hand and a clipboard of Carlos’ notes in the other, fanned out and folded back like he had been reading them.

“I was making coffee,” Cecil explained. “I hope that’s all right.”

“What happened?”

“For a long time, it screamed. Extreme heat kills it, I guess. I feel kind of awful.”  Cecil raised the mug and took a sip. “Good coffee, though. Want some?”

“What? No. I meant, suddenly blacking out.”

“Oh! Daylight savings.” Cecil sat down on the edge of the bed. “We lost an hour. Well, you lost more like two and a half.”

“I see.”

Cecil set the mug and the clipboard on the nightstand. “Did you finish your memory?”

Carlos groaned and leaned back, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I hope so.”

“So? What happened?”

“I’ll… tell you later.”

“We should do _something_ ,” Cecil said, sounding a little disappointed that said something wouldn’t be hearing about the Wednesday that never happened. “It’s probably best if you don’t try and sleep for a couple of hours. You were out for a while. I was starting to get worried.”

Carlos sat back up. Reaching out, he angled Cecil’s head down before planting a kiss on his forehead.

Cecil smiled, chewing the inside of one cheek to keep from grinning.  “We could talk some more,” he suggested. “Oh! I could show you cat videos online.”

“Or,” began Carlos, making an effort to sound like he’d at least considered those other options. “If you’re up for it, we could… you know… again.”

Cecil leaned away slightly. His expression grew guarded.

Carlos wasn’t sure what he’d said wrong.

“It’s Wednesday,” said Cecil.

Carlos got in a few seconds worth of traumatic panicking before he realized what Cecil was getting at. “Oh,” he said. “So the sex will be…”

“Weird,” offered Cecil, which was a little worrying. If _Cecil_ thought it was a little weird, well…

“It’s fine,” said Carlos, taking a moment to reminisce. “I think I like weird.”

**Author's Note:**

> Epilogue - - Later that night, Cecil shared with Carlos the cat videos. They were more frighting than he could have imagined.


End file.
